The Soldier Spy

Meir Dagan was born in 1945 inside the smoldering debris of war torn Europe. His family made it to Israel when Meir was five, newcomers arriving to an uncertain future in an infant nation made up primarily of new immigrants and refugees. The Holocaust never left young Meir’s DNA. He carried it with him as a chip on his shoulder and fuel to fire his military aspirations. He made the army his life and served in the paratroopers as a commissioned officer. He fought gallantly in the Six Day War and befriended a swashbuckling general named Ariel Sharon. The friendship between the two men would last a lifetime.

In 1970 Dagan formed an commando force that masqueraded as local Palestinians and infiltrated every aspect of the terrorist safe haven. The innovative unit and its operations rewrote the counterterrorism manual. Meir Dagan fought in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, displaying leadership and courage under fire. In 1982, he led tanks into Beirut during Israel’s Lebanon War.

When faced with an onslaught of Hamas and Islamic Jihad suicide bombings, Dagan realized that a new tactic was needed to unconventionally battle terrorism off the battlefield. Money was the oxygen that fueled the fires of Islamic fundamentalism; the terrorists received hundreds of millions of dollars from Iran and the Gulf Arab states, as well as from donations made into charitable foundations around the world. Cutting off this flow of cash, Dagan believed, would incapacitate the terrorists’ ability to target Israeli civilians.

In 1996 Dagan was placed in charge of Israel’s Counterterrorism Bureau. He created Harpoon, a financial counterterrorism task force encompassing representatives from the military, the intelligence services, the police, and other ministries. In 2002, when Prime Minister Sharon appointed his old friend to serve as the head of the Mossad, Dagan brought Harpoon to Israel’s intelligence service and it became operational. Harpoon’s calling card was “follow the money, target the money, and kill the money.”

Harpoon targeted the hundreds of millions of dollars that Yasir Arafat stole from Western aid money that was used to fund suicide bombers. Dagan ordered his officers to undermine the black markets, and to confiscate funds destined for terrorist cells. The banks that the terrorists used were placed inside Harpoon’s sights. Once the terror chiefs couldn’t pay salaries or buy the materials needed to blow up buses, the suicide-bombings ended.

Dagan urged the Israel Air Force to bomb the banks where Hezbollah, the Iranian-sponsored Shiite terrorist group in Lebanon, kept its cash. Harpoon also attacked a drug smuggling empire that Hezbollah ran in South America to finance its efforts against Israel and the United States. Harpoon targeted banks and bankers, using sophisticated computer hacking to peek inside Hezbollah’s inner most financial secrets; scams were used to defraud Hezbollah’s top leadership. And, using spies and lawyers, Harpoon launched a crippling offensive against a Lebanese bank that helped to finance Hezbollah operations against Israel and against U.S. forces in Iraq.

As the Mossad director, Dagan helped to engineer the economic sanctions brought against Iran—sanctions that ultimately brought Tehran to the negotiations table. When Dagan left the Mossad in 2011 after eight years as director, he became an outspoken critic of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s desire to preemptively bomb Iran’s nuclear reactors, sincerely believing it could not be effectively carried out.

Meir Dagan vanquished virtually all the opponents he faced on the battlefield, but cancer proved to be an unbeatable foe. After a gallant fight, the disease ultimately took the soldier spy’s life in March 2016. Dagan was remembered as one of the best, longest-serving and most dynamic Mossad commanders in Israel’s history. His “follow the money and destroy the money” playbook became the template used by the U.S. and its allies with great success in the battle against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner is an Israeli civil rights attorney. She is the president of Shurat HaDin, an Israeli law center base that has represented hundreds of terror victims in lawsuits around the world. She is the co-author of HARPOON: INSIDE THE COVERT WAR AGAINST TERRORISM’S MONEY MASTERS to be published on November 7, 2017, by Hachette Books.